Ivan is coming?

Ivan Rosenberg, who is an organizational consultant who worked with Matt Mountain at Gemini, is coming back to the Institute to talk to the Divisions. Next Tuesday and Wednesday he’ll be talking to some ESS people and some of our internal customers.

Joe’s plan is to have some leads, some of the long-term staff, and some of our long term users join some of the management team for two sessions (two to three hours each) to discuss what works about our current organization, what works and what doesn’t, and how we can improve our interactions. I don’t have any sense of where this will go, but I’m looking forward to meeting with Ivan.

I’m reminded of this quote:

“I think they feel that their past record justifies their continued existence.
That’s an understandable motivation, but it’s not sufficient.
We’re going to have to earn our future.”

That’s Matt Mountain, of course, from the Nature article.

I don’t know if we’ll have to do more with less, or less with less, or more with more. The budget situation is still unclear, and we have nothing official. (Unofficially, it looks like next year will be about the same as this year, with the likelihood of one or two additional positions if we officially get a servicing mission.) We do need our customers and users to better understand what they’re getting for their dollars, and we probably need to do a better job understanding their needs.

I’d be happy if we could cut out some of the management pathology that has been a constant at the Institute for longer than I’ve been here. So I plan to certainly raise that with Ivan. (And with Matt, if I get the chance.)

You’ll recall that Ivan was here before, and after getting his preliminary report, Matt made changes in the Directorate. I expect that when Ivan delivers his report on ESS, somebody (maybe Matt, maybe Mike, maybe Joe) will want to make changes. I guess I hope that the changes won’t require asking people to leave the building, but I’m not counting on that.